Look no further than the dissent to United States v. Wong Kim Ark (when the Supreme Court ruled that the passage you cited grants citizenship by birthright), written by Chief Justice Melville Fuller, the mastermind behind such legal opinions as:

• Racial segregation is completely legal (Plessy v. Ferguson)
• States can’t regulate workplace conditions or enact maximum working hours laws (Lochner v. New York)
• Income tax is unconstitutional (Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust)

Anyway, he wrote:

the children of Chinese born in this country do not, ipso facto, become citizens of the United States unless the fourteenth amendment overrides both treaty and statute

and

[Birthright citizenship means] the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay or other race, were eligible to the presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not.

So in other words, he was willing to rule that the constitution is optional as long as you are using it against undesirable races in order to get his way.

It’s not just for decoration. You can use it as a legitimate pointing device. Nudging it will move the mouse cursor and tapping it with your fingernail is clicking.

It takes some getting used to but you can definitely use it for normal office tasks if you wanted to. That being said, I still personally prefer a mouse. But I have known some people who like using the nipple.

Those who don’t use it are only mildly annoyed by it, but those who use it will raise holy hell now that it’s gone.

Oh well. I must confess though, watching a 1.5 hour video to make sure I didn’t say something they already said didn’t seem like an appealing proposition to me.

I see. That’s not technically the first sentence though. I stopped looking once I got to line 6.

What’s the spelling mistake? I didn’t see it.

Tangent to the original discussion, but Trump is currently suing the Justice Department for raiding Mar-a-lago (back when we actually had hope that this man would be held to account for his crimes). When he takes office, he could ostensibly direct the Justice Department to settle the case and pay him a settlement.

Friday: GoDaddy CEO donates $1,000,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund

Monday: Trump takes office

Tuesday: Senate confirms new FTC chair

Wednesday: FTC announces a settlement with GoDaddy where the FTC will withdraw the case and GoDaddy agrees to a $125,000 penalty paid over the next five years

LegalEagle and Wendover Productions actually beat them to the punch (Nebula) on this. They filed on 29th December 2024, a whole 4 days earlier.

And since the US courts charge money to get these documents, I downloaded a copy of the complaint earlier on my PACER account so anyone who’s interested can read it without incurring the stupid fees. Enjoy

Edit: Devin Stone (the host of LegalEagle) is actually a lawyer on this case. His name and his law firm are listed as a lawyer for the plaintiff on the complaint.

Oregonian here. I am ready to pledge allegiance to the king any minute

One can still fantasize about a brighter future, can they?

Rikers Island becoming the new seat of the American government wasn’t something I had on my bingo card

Machiavelli wrote about this. People don’t need to love you for your power to be secure, and in fact, it’s far preferable to be respected because people fear you than to be respected because people love you.

I’ve heard it said before that most of China’s geopolitical strategies can be explained with two statements:

1. War is bad for business.
2. China is big on business.

It took the NYPD’s top detectives five whole days to arrest a suspect, and if he hadn’t been stupid enough to keep the gun then he’d probably have even gotten away with it.

There’s probably a good chance he’ll still get away with it via jury nullification, and I’m kinda hoping that happens.

Literally my first thought

I point my finger at Joe Manchin and Kristen Synema for sinking the DC Admission Act back in 2021. We were this close to a 51st state! The bill had already passed the House of Representatives and had the support of every other Democrat. Biden said he’d sign it.

That was a typographical error. I fixed it

Lot of derision but not much explanation as to how this strange system came to be.

Many state constitutions in the US were written in the 18th and 19th centuries. The key differences relevant here to this discussion were that during these times, suffrage was far more restricted, and communities were far more sparsely populated and isolated.

Prior to the 20th century, suffrage was not universal and generally was restricted to wealthy white men of status, who, as a consequence of their socioeconomic standing, also tended to be more educated and thus better suited to rationally judge the qualifications of office-seekers. A consequence of universal suffrage is that the education level of the average voter goes down.

Most Europeans severely underestimate how few people lived in these states and across how much land they occupied. The US typically granted statehood to its territories when they reached the mid to high five digits in population. The majority of Western states are the same size as the largest European countries. Let me use California as an illustrative example. Its statehood was granted in 1850 and it had a population of 92,597. So just imagine essentially a group of people fewer in number than a single small European city trying to run a piece of territory the size of Germany (California is actually bigger than Germany by 69,000 km²).

What happens in such a scenario is that communities become very isolated and insular. They get used to running their own affairs since basically any model of centralised government is going to fail when your population density is 0.2 people per km².

Understand that aside from tightly-knit indigenous communities (who were branded as “savages” and categorically excluded from participation in so-called “civilised” society) this was literally unsettled land. Empty plains, dry desert, and wild forest for hundreds of kilometres around where there was no law but those of physics.

In these isolated communities, you still need to fill the required leadership roles, but you run into the issue where nobody is particularly qualified to these offices and further still, the townsfolk don’t really want to just elect a single person to fill all the other offices by appointments. Rather the best way to fill these offices is by election where the community can get together and decide collectively who is best qualified for office. So how it would go is that everyone entitled to suffrage would, every other year, ride their horses into the county seat, which could take hours, and then listen to the candidates’ campaign pitches, vote for whomever they thought was the most qualified for sheriff and county judge, and then go home and never hear from those people again for months on end.

As a result, when these territories were granted statehood, most delegates to the conventions that wrote the state constitutions saw no reason to deviate from these established methods for picking local office-holders.

Edit: I realise this also doesn’t explain why these constitutions haven’t been amended to allow for appointed judges in the modern US. The reason is because politics in the US is extremely cutthroat and anyone who proposes such an amendment is taking a rather unnecessary risk with their political career because their political opponents can then attack them for taking away power from the voters in favour of “unelected bureaucrats”.

I think he will see that very few people give a shit what the mountain is officially called. People who want to call it “Mount McKinley” will continue to call it “Mount McKinley” and people who want to call it “Denali” will continue to call it “Denali”.